He said she was becoming a pain to the authorities – it wasn’t clear to him why - and was scheduled to be transported to the internment camp at Dehra Dun in the next few weeks. He seemed quite sad to see her go. She sounded interesting if not eccentric and I asked for her name: ‘Aunty…’ he replied jauntily. ‘That’s all she’s got on her records. She’s got no birth certificate, just that her name, Aunty, like a code. My very own Aunty… Something about her that makes me homesick. But you know there’s nothing else on her records, no date of birth, or place, no personal history. I reckon they don’t know what to do with her. There’s a whiff of the kraut about her. She’s ‘alf German they say – question is which ‘alf?’

He had laughed crudely as I pricked up my ears. There couldn’t have been many women in Calcutta going solely by that name. On the few sheets of paper I had been given in the file matched that name and the brief description I’d been given. I’d been planning to travel to Darjeeling the next week to find some of these characters out - this was some luck, wasn’t it? Though none of my own enquiries had led me to find out she was in the city itself. It crossed my mind that perhaps the authorities had never wanted us to meet.

This sergeant – small chap, yappy like a terrier – was only too ‘appy to help me out when I’d managed to wave some contraband from England under his nose. He never asked reasons, I suppose they are trained not to, or maybe because socially I was his superior or perhaps I held no interest for him. It didn’t mean that he refrained from his own conclusions though. ‘Spend as long as yer like,’ he said crudely giving me a wink, ‘Anything goes in dear Calcutta…’

She was being held in a small lower class apartment in Barahanagar that could have passed for servant quarters in England – dreary and damp with an old iron wrought staircase hanging off the exterior, and a mango tree just beginning to push its roots through the brick having seeded itself last monsoons – it was a slightly Dickensian set up all round and although the building and pavements around were clean there was a sense of decay in the air, as if indeed these were the dogs days of the Raj, and even the trees knew what was about, had sensed their opportunity and taken it. I greeted my man on the door who gave me yet another wink and, to my chagrin, knocked on my behalf, giving me a little push as I went in.